Lexicology and corpus linguistics An introduction

1. Lexicology and corpus linguisticsAn introduction Halliday- Teubert- Yallop- Čermáková Lexicology Words and meaning 4. Directions in corpus linguistics

2. …some points already discussed elsewhere • Brown Corpus 1961 contains the Library of Congress Catalogue (all the printed publications in the USA in 1961) • representativeness: high frequency words, low frequency words, hapax legomena • corpus typology (design, size, etc…) • parallel/translation corpora – alignment (more useful than bilingual dictionaries)

3. Meaning in discourse (pp. 125-151) • meaning emerges from discourse • the speech community agrees on meaning • neologisms: Eurotrash • new meaning to an already-existing word: wicked (wrong, cruel) - slang: very good tart (pie) – youth speech: bad girl, prostitute • cold caller= somebody who tries to sell things contacting people by phone

4. globalisation / globalization OED Etymology:  < global adj. + -ization suffix, perhaps after French globalisation... 1930 The action, process, or fact of making global; esp. (in later use) the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale, widely considered to be at the expense of national identity. Macmillan English Dictionary for Foreign Learners 2002 (economics) The idea that the world is developing a single economy and culture as a result of improved technology and communications and the influence of very large multinational companies

5. Meaning as usage • usage= authentic language use • usage is given by the word, its phrasal positions which occur with a satisfactory frequency and with a defined statistical frequency in context e.g. increasing ~, the effects of ~, ~ of financial markets, etc… • The methodology of corpus linguistics is aimed at determining the usage of lexical items • The usage profile of a word generated by a computer (concordancer) is like a fingerprint of a word as part of a unit of meaning

6. citations from the Bank of English Forum, the main anti- globalisation umbrella group at the defended against anti- globalisation protesters by one of than we used to. Despite globalisation, the worldhas at the debate, related to the globalisation of the worldeconomy, of the protest against globalisation is, however, mistakenly has held our against globalisation of culture for a long time is the argument that globalisationmeans economic problems artistic strategies. Globalisation here meansthe same old and economic globalisation was kidding themselves economicpolicy is the globalisation of markets . If economic change in the wake of globalisation, internationalcompeti Related has been the globalisation of internationalmanu In businesslaw globalisation will cause even worse illogical attacks on the globalisation of business

7. A computer can create a lexical profile • 200 citations from the BoE • the most frequent collocates of globalisation: anti, world, against, means, economic, international, business • globalization (468 hits) vs globalisation (1,447) • the most frequent collocates of globalization: economic, markets, world, investment, financial, international (not anti and against)

8. Meaning is paraphrase • Globalization is: a fact, a trend, a process, a phenomenon, an opportunity, inherently harmful, is not inevitable, etc… • A lot of debating, worrying, talking about globalisation; campaigns against, benefits, impact, pressures, forces, etc… • Globalisation is connected with emotions and these are predominantly negative ones.

9. globalisation (press) globalization (books) • citations of globalization come from books, many American • more neutral, matter-of-fact tone • texts from newspapers often have a sceptical tone • professional and academic texts are more neutral

10. globalization, globalization theory (Oxford Dictionary of Sociology 1998) Globalization theory examines the emergence of a global cultural system. It suggests that global culture is brought about by a variety of social and cultural developments: the existence of a world-satellite information system; the emergence of global patterns of consumption and consumerism; the cultivation of cosmopolitan life-styles; the emergence of global sport such as the Olympic Games ... the spread of world tourism; the decline of the sovereignty of the nation-state ... More importantly, globalism involves a new consciousness of the world as a single place. ... Perhaps the most concise definition suggests that globalization is 'a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people are becoming increasingly aware that they are receding' (Malcolm Waters, Globalization, 1995) ...

11. Meaning as negotiation • the meaning of a word is negotiated in a discourse community • the example of globalization shows that the discourse community is not at all homogeneous • once all citations have been examined, the lexicographer will write up a coherent, concise definition that can be put in a dictionary

12. friendly fire • 1976 a novel about an American soldier in Vietnam killed accidentally by fire from American forces • The phrase immediately catches on • Blue on blue (from videogames: the goodies are blue, the baddies are red) • Is friendly fire a unit of meaning? Should it lemmatised?

13. Metaphorisation • ‘friendly fire’ is a unit of meaning • when a phrase can be paraphrased and its interpretation become acceptable by a speech community, then the phrase is a unit of meaning • ‘friendly fire’: euphemistic use: it covers the cruelties of war, the horror of violent death; it manipulates people’s feelings • one more indicator of a ‘true’ collocation is metaphorisation (used in a different domain, e.g. politics) • ‘true’ collocations are not only statistically significant but also semantically relevant

14. conclusion • the ambiguity of traditional linguistics will disappear once we replace the medieval concept of a single word by the new concept of collocation or a unit of meaning. Instead of choosing among four senses for friendly and eight senses for fire, we end up with one single meaning for the fixed expression ‘friendly fire’. • For corpus linguistics whatever is important in language will be repeated in other texts. • For corpus linguistics meaning is a social phenomenon. The members of a language community negotiate what units of meaning mean.